Is It Just Us, or Has Holiday Bad Behavior Gotten Worse This Year?

Circle up, team, because it's time for a serious chat. The holidays can be a stressful time, what with all the forced family togetherness and dear God the expenses, and it's not like the 24/7 seasonal music helps.

This year, though, you'd think Mercury was in retrograde and maybe we were all hexed, too. Judging from the stories coming across the transom, people are acting up even worse than usual. It seems—I hate to say it—that Christmas has perhaps finally sent the entire nation around the bend.

In New Jersey, someone tried—and failed—to set an atheist billboard ("Keep Saturn in Saturnalia") on fire. If there is a God, someone will round up the team that made Saved and turn this into next year's feel-good holiday hit.

A made-up story about an atheist teacher suspending a kid for saying "Merry Christmas" went viral, and now a San Francisco school is dealing with a flood of hateful emails and angry phone calls, to the point they've added extra security.

In L.A., a frat holiday party/toy drive at an airport Radisson allegedly turned into a brawl, with suspects "throwing chairs and tables."

A Massachusetts woman accidentally drove through the plate-glass window of a hardware store and destroyed their holiday display.

In the movies, these types of foreboding incidents typically build to the fucking apocalypse. What is even going on? And now, as if Megyn Kelly taking a stand for White Santa weren't enough, everyone with conservative relatives has to go home and argue about Obamacare pajama kid vs. goddamn Duck Dynasty.

So let's all just take a deep breath, pour a big glass of bourbon-heavy eggnog and concentrate on not hitting someone upside the head with wrapped gift on Christmas morning. K?